The Blind Girl of Castel Cuille
Only the Lowland tongue of Scotland mightRehearse this little tragedy aright;Let me attempt it with an English quill;And take, O Reader, for the deed the will.
Words in this poem
- lowland n.
- Land which is low with respect to the neighboring country; a low or level country; -- opposed to highland. The Lowlands, Belgium and Holland; the Netherlands; also, the southern part of Scotland.
- aright adv.
- Rightly; correctly; in a right way or form; without mistake or crime; as, to worship God aright. [Pref. a- + right.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Blind Girl of Castel Cuille is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Project Gutenberg ebook #1365; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Blind Girl of Castel Cuille, in A Psalm of Life, and Other Poems (1839–1882), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #1365, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/longfellow-poems/the-blind-girl-of-castel-cuille.html, id L26183.
Form and metre
The Blind Girl of Castel Cuille is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: octosyllabic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
See other poems in octosyllabic couplets, other poems in iambic tetrameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 1 AABB mightA · arightA · quillB · willB
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against iambic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Only the Lowland tongue of Scotland might | 10 | /˘·/···/˘· |
| Rehearse this little tragedy aright; | 9 | ˘/·/˘/˘˘/ |
| Let me attempt it with an English quill; | 10 | ··˘/···/˘· |
| And take, O Reader, for the deed the will. | 10 | ···/˘····· |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.